Photo-amateurs against professionals: the people of the internet is rocking another market. It's stock photography, the sap that feeds the trade of archival images, historical photos and generic shots at the service of advertisers and publishers, with a turnover of over 2 billion dollars a year.

The success of the online community for digital photographers, most notably Flickr, a subsidiary of Yahoo, has stimulated the birth of a new type of sites, called microstock portals, that leverage amateurs and semi professionals to offer competitive at bargain prices. The phenomenon is growing so quickly that it has already alerted the most powerful photo agencies worldwide, because the price differential is abysmal: $ 200 for the traditional image archive against an average of $ 1-2 on microstock sites.

The paradox of the situation is that over the last decade the field of stock photography has already gone through a painful revolution: the consolidation of hundreds of small agencies in a handful of multinational giants. Getty Images, founded by Mark Getty, one of the scions of the legendary family of American oil companies, is the number one, with a turnover of 807 million dollars in 2006. Corbis, Bill Gates', despite a more modest turnover (251 million dollars), but boasts the largest collection (over 100 million images) and is undoubtedly the most famous brand.

These Goliaths, thanks to financial resources, they put the turbo on the digital conversion of the sector, transforming the old archives into electronic databases, which can be sifted with specialized search engines, no longer need to send prints and slides back and forth to clients.
Technological efficiency of the approach have since joined the large economies of scale. Corbis has been buying up historical images, with a flurry of acquisitions that include the American archives Bettman, those of Sigma Zefa French and German. Getty has grown even more rapidly, until you get to be about 40% of the market.

Yet despite the reality of the limits of the oligopoly, the results are disappointing. Corbis, in 17 years, has not generated a single dollar of profit. Getty Images, listed company, is rather profitable, but has seen the value of the collapse of more than 40% in one year.

And it is here that come into play the microstock "David" : companies like Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, 123RF, BigStockPhoto, JupiterImages, plus dozens of smaller competitors. The strategy they have in common is to not spend any money to buy exclusive rights to photos or create from scratch, aiming instead to market an ocean of images provided by the public (the authors upload photos themselves), thanks to research and purchase online systems.

The reaction speaks volumes: Getty Images bought iStockPhoto last year, securing a prominent position on the microstock market. Corbis has instead just announced a change of the summit: the new administrator Gary Shenk, in a statement, he readily admitted: "On the internet pages of Flickr there are things more innovative to Corbis or Getty!"

[from Italian weekly magazine: L'Espresso - 21th June 2007]

Translated by Domenico Guercia